Press releases
Pirate Party Australia endorses the following statement from Pirate Parties International:
The PPI is strictly against extraditing the two people interned in Cordoba (Argentina) to the United States because of their involvement with the platform Z-Library. Z-Library’s mission is to collect all human knowledge, despite of copyright.
Pirate Party Australia endorses the following statement from Pirate Parties International:
Due to the military actions of the Russian and Belarusian regimes against the democratic state of Ukraine and its citizens, PPI expresses with this open letter its full support, sympathy and solidarity with our friends, colleagues, and the people of Ukraine.
Cooperation, dialogue, tolerance, mutual support, and democracy are firmly believed in within our community of pirates. We condemn the brutal invasion of Ukraine, the killing of its citizens, and the imprisonment of protestors in Russia and Belarus. As a global community committed to fully developing human freedoms, we stand for human rights, freedom, and democracy and call on all parties concerned to do the same.
We offer all possible assistance in this situation to the Ukrainian pirates, as well as to all people of Ukraine who are suffering from war and fighting for freedom. Our thoughts are also with our colleagues in Russia and Belarus, who are forced to watch but are powerless to help in the face of government-initiated aggression against their and our principles.
We are free people, but the current situation affects all of us, both citizens of Europe and members of the PPI family. Sadly, we have to admit that the current situation does not allow us to continue our activities in cooperation with Russia and Belarus at the national representative level. PPI will no longer organize events in Russia or Belarus, and PPI board members will not accept invitations to speak or participate in events organized by governments of these countries.
As a democratic organization, PPI understands that Russian/Belarusian aggression causes collateral damage to all people of goodwill worldwide. Therefore, PPI will not hinder individual assistance to Russian and Belarusian colleagues in accessing critical information or freely sharing knowledge. We trust that our friends and colleagues in Russia and Belarus who condemn this war will understand and support PPI’s approach.
With this statement and our actions, we show solidarity with friends, colleagues, and families affected by this terrible humanitarian tragedy. We join others in calling for an end to this war and respect for democracy and international humanitarian law.
Early on Saturday morning, Pirate Parties International issued the following statement:
“The Pirates of Europe and the world strongly condemn the actions taken by Vladimir Putin. It’s with deep sorrow that we watch the events in Ukraine unfold, and our thoughts are with the people of Ukraine, those suffering the consequences of this conflict, and those opposing the war inside of Russia. We hope for a swift and peaceful resolution to this conflict, and for the immediate end of all hostilities in the region.”[1]
Pirate Party Australia endorses this statement, and repeats the call for the Australian government to add to the international sanctions against Russia in any way possible, blocking their access to Australian markets.
The Pirate Party commemorates the memory of Aaron Swartz: hacker, activist, and Internet freedom fighter.
Today we commemorate the birth of Internet freedom fighter Aaron Swartz in Brooklyn, New York City on November 8th 1986. As co-founder of Reddit and contributor to the RSS1.0 web specification, he was immersed in computers, technology and internet culture from a young age. But It was his download of hundreds of thousands of academic journal entries in 2010 that became his greatest act of self sacrifice. For the crime of legally accessing journal articles through his JSTOR account granted by Harvard, he was punished with $1 million dollars in fines and a 35 year jail sentence that was never carried out after he died of suicide on January 11th 2013.[1][2] His fight for freedom of access to scientific knowledge is carried on by Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of https://scihub.org/ [3]
As part of its latest assault on the right of Australian Citizens to privately access a free and open Internet, the Online Safety Bill 2021 was recently passed by both houses of government.
This lengthy Bill grants extraordinarily broad powers to a so-called “E-Safety Commissioner”, with no statutory limits, in a short-sighted attempt to improve the safety of Australians online. Their rulings are not subject to appeal, and purport to extend across the entire world, regardless of jurisdiction or international borders. They grant the Commissioner near-unlimited power to censor the Internet, and compel assistance from all individuals, internet service providers, hosting services, social media platforms and communications services to facilitate investigations, without any regard for the security of these services or the privacy rights of individuals.
To make matters worse, the Bill is in no way limited to the more laudable objectives of preventing distribution of material that is harmful in its creation or violates users’ privacy (such as child pornography or non-consensual sharing of private intimate video), and instead seeks to apply sweeping restrictions to the entire internet. The Commissioner is empowered to censor or restrict access to any kind of adult content, prevent ordinary people from sharing videos of violent confrontations, intervene in online verbal disputes between school children or Australian adults, construct mandatory industry standards without parliamentary oversight, and indeed “do anything incidental to or conducive to” any of their other goals… all at their sole discretion.
While child pornography and similarly abhorrent material have no place in civilised society, these matters should be handled by Police under judicial oversight and limitation, not by an unaccountable and despotic government-appointed bureaucrat. These laws do not create a “safe” internet for anybody but the government. They harm activists, they harm whistleblowers, they harm sex workers, they harm civilian journalists, they harm free speech, they harm privacy, they harm security, and they harm every single Australian who uses the internet. But for Labour, the Coalition, and the new E-Safety Commissioner, it seems the ends truly do justify the means.